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CHEERS WENT UP IN FUTURES MARKETS everywhere when the news broke of Leeson's detention in Germany last Thursday after his Royal Brunei airliner landed in Frankfurt after a 12-hour flight. Leeson had left Kuala Lumpur to rendezvous with his wife Lisa in the Malaysian resort town of Kota Kinabalu, and there, after plunking down $1,600 in cash for seats in the economy section, he boarded the plane in his own name. Malaysian authorities just missed catching up with the Leesons. But reports of their flight immediately circulated abroad. In Frankfurt, German police, carrying pictures of the couple, boarded the plane and took the Leesons into custody. After drinking some tea, Nick Leeson asked for a lawyer and telephoned the British consulate.
Lisa has been released and is back in Britain. Nick's immediate future is uncertain. Singapore has requested his extradition, and Leeson will no doubt contest any attempt to send him back to Asia. In addition to a German lawyer, Leeson has retained lawyers from Kingsley Napley, Britain's leading firm specializing in white-collar crime. Leeson, said Christopher Murray, his attorney at the firm, simply wanted to return to England "to put the record straight." Leeson's sister Sarah, 18, was emphatic. "One person can't lose all that money," she said. "They are playing on his background, making him a scapegoat because of his upbringing. There has got to be a conspiracy"
If Singapore gets Leeson, it will most likely charge him with aggravated cheating and deception. It has already charged him with criminal breach of trust and forgery of certificates. Last week Singapore police seized stationery with faked company letterheads and a dummy bank ticket that said $80 million had been deposited into a Barings futures account at Citibank. No such transfer took place, and prosecutors are likely to argue that it gave Leeson a way of proving he was making the huge Nikkei trades on behalf of a client. "Once he is here," says Pala Krishnan, one of Singapore's leading criminal attorneys, "the maximum sentence he can receive is 14 years, if he is tried by a lower court. If he is tried by a higher court, then the sentence is life." Leeson and Barings should have got out while they were ahead.
--Reported by John Colmey and Frank Gibney Jr./Singapore, Edward W. Desmond/Tokyo, Jay Branegan and Barry Hillenbrand/London, Bruce van Voorst/Bonn and Sribala Subramanian/New York